Just good friends?

Leo Apotheker, HP's chief executive, knows he needs to act fast to make HP a strategic partner for business IT - in the way that enterprises view rivals just as Accenture and IBM.

The largest IT company in the world

His firm might however be the largest IT company in the world and the only one offering the full gamut of products and services, from smartphones to supercomputers. But much of what HP provides, Apotheker admits, is commoditised or competes primarily on price.

Businesses have plenty of choices for low-cost x86 hardware, including vendors just as Dell and Lenovo. In spite of HP's purchase of EDS, analysts claimed it had failed to break through into the top level of business IT services and strategic consulting. EDS remained primarily a "body shop" providing outsourced IT services.

The HP Summit

At the HP Summit, he as well stressed the importance of the cloud. HP will increasingly provide IT services directly to its clients via cloud computing offerings, Longbottom predicted. It has consolidated its own internal data centres and might however start to repurpose - or even build - data centres to host clients' applications.

The development of WebOS and cloud computing puts HP in direct competition with Microsoft. With Azure in the cloud, Windows Phone 7 in the mobile space and Windows 7 and CE, the fight is on, even though Microsoft is unlikely to be happy with this loss of HP's affections.

In some ways, clearly, HP and Microsoft has always been a marriage of convenience. There are plenty of engineers in HP who would or rather be developing Unix systems than supporting Windows.

But if HP and Microsoft do drift apart, it will make for some difficult decisions for enterprises, around both personal computing and cloud architectures. HP and Microsoft's options may not be compatible and CIOs could find themselves forced to choose which friend to side with.